After receiving $7.2 million in taxpayers’ money, BVI Airways should stop making excuses and start offering direct flights to Miami as promised.
Unfortunately, that seems unlikely to happen anytime soon now that the airline has laid off staff and begun pointing fingers.
The company’s behaviour has been extremely disheartening, but the government ultimately must shoulder the blame for awarding BVIA a remarkably favourable contract without taking standard best-practice measures such as public tendering.
When leaders announced the deal in January 2016 after closed-door negotiations, BVIA promised to launch the flights by last October. Nine months after that target, it is instead launching an attack on government and claiming it needs more money to get off the ground. This, after government paid out $2 million that under the original contract wasn’t due until after flights started.
BVIA is full of excuses, but to our thinking only one of them — regulatory delays — approaches a reasonable explanation for the airline’s failure to fly by now. Because neither BVIA nor government has been sufficiently transparent, it is difficult to know who is ultimately to blame for the regulatory setbacks, but there did appear to be a months-long delay in the airline’s approval from the United Kingdom regulator Air Safety Support International. Nevertheless, that delay shouldn’t have come as a major surprise for anyone familiar with government bureaucracy, and it doesn’t seem to us to justify the airline’s contention that it can’t afford to fly now.
BVIA also claims that it has been hampered by the VI government’s failure to make agreed improvements to the airport. But this allegation, which the government has disputed, is weak at best: American Airlines’ 72-passenger planes used to operate at the airport regularly, and we see no reason why BVIA’s 86-passenger jets couldn’t do the same while any outstanding improvements were completed.
Finally, BVIA has claimed that its problems were exacerbated by the government’s December announcement of a preferred bidder for the planned airport expansion. But given that the expansion has been in the works since 2012, this excuse is laughable.
It is also troubling that documents suggest that three BVIA executives previously worked with a New York-based airline called Baltia, which in its 27-plus years of existence has never flown in spite of allegedly raising millions from investors. After the Beacon reported this connection, BVIA apparently blacklisted us from receiving press announcements and attending publicity events.
Given the circumstances, government should not give BVIA another dollar, even if it means writing off the $7.2 million that already has been paid out. What leaders should do is provide taxpayers with a detailed account of how their money has been spent so far. While they’re at it, they should disclose the anonymous stakeholders who own nearly 26 percent of the company.
In the future, government must do better. The current stalemate perhaps could have been avoided if leaders had taken basic steps that ought to be standard before the award of any major contract involving taxpayers’ money.
Instead of making a closed-door deal with the airline, government should have issued a widely publicised tender notice seeking proposals for the provision of direct flights. Besides helping to ensure better value for money, this process would have given local airlines — at least one of which previously expressed an interest in providing direct flights — a chance to throw their hat in the ring.
After receiving the bids, government should have thoroughly and transparently reviewed all proposals and conducted careful due diligence on any bidders, including background checks designed to ensure that none had taken part in any questionable projects in the past.
Only after taking such steps should government have chosen a partner. And the contract, unlike BVIA’s, should have included stiff penalties for non-performance, including provisions for the full return of taxpayers’ money if necessary.
Moving forward, we hope that the airline will reconsider its position and start offering flights straightaway. Failing that, government should at the very least learn an important lesson that has eluded successive administrations for decades: Procedures such as transparent tendering are called “best practice” for a reason.
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